Free Thought Lives

How David Graeber Cancelled a Colleague

At the height of the #MeToo scandal in 2018, when dozens of actresses were coming forward with sordid testimonies about Harvey Weinstein’s sexual predation, a much more obscure scandal was unfolding around an academic journal involving the anthropologist David Graeber. The journal—HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory—was imploding after Graeber, a former editor-at-large, alleged that members of staff had been treated in “shocking ways” and made a public apology, distancing himself from the enterprise. No specifics were given, but accusations spread like wildfire on social media. Many treated the scandal as a pretext to demand that the discipline of anthropology itself undertake a period of introspection and soul-searching. Some said that this was anthropology’s #MeToo moment.

HAU was set up as a digital publication by the Cambridge PhD student Giovanni da Col in 2011, while he was working in the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit under the supervision of Caroline Humphrey. While many students have had concerns that anthropology is a field in decline, da Col actually wanted to do something about it, by establishing an open access journal that would promote the highest quality scholarship possible. Named after the Maori concept of hau in Marcel Mauss’s book The Gift, the journal was inspired partly by resistance to the corporate publishing model, and partly by scepticism about the influence of continental theory on anthropology. Because anthropology has traditionally been the study of human societies, their cultures and their development, the journal was to focus on ethnography, not fashionable post-modern theory, which would return the discipline to its roots. In their co-authored foreword to the first volume of HAU, Graeber and da Col explained that their chosen logo of the ‘ouroboros’—a serpent eating its own tail—was a symbol not of chaos, but of regeneration. Their journal was going to resuscitate the field.

LSE Professor of Anthropology David Graeber speaks at ‘Resist: Festival of Ideas and Actions.’ Peter Marshall/Alamy

Although David Graeber co-authored the foreword to the first issue of HAU, his association with the project was mostly ornamental. The author of best-sellers Debt: the First 5000 Years and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory he achieved fame as a political activist during the Occupy Wall Street movement. Having coined the phrase “We Are the 99%,” his name is inextricably linked with “millennial socialism.” He is also the world’s most famous anarchist and is a self-described “Black Bloc veteran” (a ‘Black Bloc’ is a tactic used by protestors who wear black clothing and masks during civil unrest.) In one article published at The Anarchist Library, he proposes that governments and laws are unnecessary, because when people are left to their own devices they naturally behave in decent and democratic ways. In another essay titled “Anarchism or the Revolutionary Movement of the 21st Century” co-authored with Andrej Grubacic, he explores what he describes as “ethical discourse about revolutionary practice” which includes asking the questions “should we condemn someone who assassinates a head of state?” and “When is it OK to throw a brick?”

Giovanni da Col

Giovanni da Col, on the other hand, is famous neither as an activist nor an anthropologist. Despite not having finished his PhD, he has been a prolific contributor to academic literature on topics including Tibetan personhood, ethnographic theory and folk theories of luck and fortune. And despite Da Col’s humble status, HAU’s success was extraordinary. His intellectual vision, combined with a singular capacity for organisation, meant that some of the most distinguished, frequently cited scholars including Thomas Piketty, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, and Carlo Ginzburg were willing to publish in its pages. Several editions were organised, type-set and published every year, with the journal becoming the second-most cited journal in the field in the space of a short few years. HAU’s articles were mentioned in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and its books reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books.

Yet despite this success, or perhaps because of it, HAU’s internal tensions became an increasing focus of attention. In a report to the external advisory board on 20 June 2015, Sarah Green, Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Manchester University and the University of Helsinki, noted that although the journal was “remarkably successful,” it had “come to her attention” that “a number of people involved in the production side of HAU were feeling the strain.” This strain was linked to the Journal’s minuscule budgets, she wrote, as “the vast majority of the work is done for free by people who have to sacrifice considerable amounts of their time to do it.” She went on to describe this as a “highly familiar pattern in what is essentially a voluntary organisation.”

Within five years of HAU’s launch, it became clear that it was struggling with its commitment to the ‘free scholarship’ model. In May 2017, twenty members of the HAU board were asked to vote on a proposal made by the University of Chicago Press, which offered to become the publisher in a unique hybrid model of open-access and subscription. The idea was that everyone would receive limited free access to the journal in the hope that some would then pay for a subscription, but “for loyal readers who can’t afford a subscription…HAU will still be free to read.” The proposal was sold on the basis that it would help the journal become a sustainable project through absorbing the costs of proof-reading, type-setting, and distribution, so that it could last for at least another 20 years.

The problem was that many devotees of HAU’s open-access model opposed the partnership on principle. One of those, it would seem, was David Graeber. The University of Chicago was perceived to be a “corporate publisher” and a hybrid subscription model meant that the journal wouldn’t be purely open access anymore. Some anthropologists commented that they only worked for HAU because they believed in the free-scholarship model. Partnering with Chicago, therefore, was considered a betrayal. Just how great a betrayal would become clearer by the end of the year.

Despite these reservations, the trustees backed the merger and Carole McGranahan, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado, became the interim Board chair tasked with overseeing HAU’s transition. On 6 May 2017, Sarah Green submitted her final report to the advisory board and stepped down from her role as chair. Green discussed problems within the journal, including the over-fast expansion, lack of funding, massive pressure on the editor-in-chief, and a lack of mechanisms for resolving grievances. There was no suggestion of any impropriety, and aside from the management and structural problems, there was no indication that anything else was wrong. Green’s report ended on a positive note, citing “hope for the future” and pointing out that “HAU has been a great, and enormously innovative, project. It has now grown far bigger, and has been more significant within anthropology, than anyone could have imagined when it began… This could not have happened without Giovanni da Col.”

Yet the conflict between Da Col and Graeber was not resolved. If it was made public that graduate students’ labour was being used without compensation, Graeber’s reputation as an anarchist and a radical may have been at risk. If it became widely known that the journal created under the auspices of ‘free scholarship’ was now partnering with a corporate publisher, this would compound the risk.

The stakes were also high for da Col. HAU had become his life. It was his creation, and he had made it successful through his own hard work, tenacious entrepreneurship, and vision. He was not going to let the project collapse. He had given it his all, and he intended on seeing the project through with the additional help, funding and structure that had been secured with Chicago.

By November 2017, Graeber’s relationship with da Col had deteriorated. Further tensions were building over the book Graeber had co-authored with his former academic supervisor Marshall Sahlins—On Kings—which was released in November 2017 by HAU Books. And as the book was being released—and as the tensions between Graeber and da Col continued to escalate—the Harvey Weinstein story broke.

On 5 November 2017, Graeber wrote a column for The Guardian about sexual predation. He claimed that he had not understood the prevalence of sexual assault before learning about Weinstein’s behaviour and hearing the stories of the #MeToo movement, but he now finally realised just how widespread it was.

[W]hat startled me was one word. [Emma Thompson] described Weinstein’s behaviour as typical of a “system of harassment and belittling and bullying and interference” that women faced from time immemorial. The word that struck me was “belittling.” [emphasis added]

It is now known, thanks to a leak, that three weeks after this op-ed appeared Graeber sent an email to an apparent co-conspirator discussing a plan to portray Giovanni da Col, HAU’s editor-in-chief, as a sexual predator:

[W]e must move carefully. Unfortunately a lot of the key discussions will happen at the AAA [American Anthropological Association] so that’s over the weekend. That’s the main timeline: we are going to bring people over to our side, compile testimonies, etc, over the AAA and then hope we can move soon after that. But it’s all so contingent. One problem right now is that we have like 50 little scandals but what we need is a really big one. If you release the 20+ bad things [Giovanni da Col] did he’ll just choose the weakest one and trumpet to everyone that it was a lie, and dismiss the others. The ideal thing would be a super-clear case of sexual harassment.

The American Anthropological Association conference took place between 29 November and 3 December 2017 in Washington DC. On 30 December 2017, Graeber wrote an email to da Col urging him to step down before the “inevitable scandals hit” and warning him that legal threats will “certainly backfire”:

As one of the founders of the intellectual project, and someone whose reputation has been bound up in HAU more than anyone else…I urge you to immediately announce your resignation from the editorship of HAU—if you need assistance renegotiating the terms of your contract with Chicago, I would be happy to help.

Committed to the ideal of the open-access model, Graeber implores da Col to “make a clear statement that the failure of HAU is not due to the lack of viability of the open access model itself, and take full responsibility for what happened.”

What happened next? The journal’s board immediately set-up an investigation into the allegations of “impropriety” levelled against da Col.

On 27 January 2018, the Executive Council of HAU’s Editorial Board (including Carlos Fausto, Jane Guyer, Michael Lambek, Rena Lederman, Michael Puett, and Andrew Shryock) issued a statement addressing the allegations made against HAU, declaring that they had carried out their own internal investigation into the alleged improprieties. They determined that the allegations were unfounded, writing that “our review of the available evidence which has been conducted with due diligence…strongly suggests that many of the allegations are based on unverified rumor, on exaggeration without context, and, most disturbingly, on wilful efforts to prompt or even potentially fabricate charges [emphasis added].”

* * *

In the months that followed the investigation and da Col’s vindication, the restructuring of HAU and its partnership with the University of Chicago Press proceeded. During this period, Carole McGranahan stepped down as interim chair of the Board of HAU. The formerly unincorporated association which ran HAU (The Society of Ethnographic Theory) dissolved; all its advisory boards were dismissed. A new non-profit organisation (a company limited by guarantee) was established.

Notwithstanding all these changes, da Col remained editor-in-chief. On 11 June 2018, the new Board of Trustees of HAU, which consisted of 10 trustees (as well as the renowned anthropologist, Michael Lambek, as guarantor) released a statement announcing that the journal had finally joined with Chicago. HAU had also restructured, had a new editorial committee, and was now governed by new bylaws because it was a non-profit company limited by guarantee. Things were looking optimistic for the journal.

For a brief period, Graeber appeared to have been thwarted in his plans to make da Col resign. This period came to a close, however, when on the very same day that HAU announced its partnership with Chicago, Graeber’s former advisor and co-author of On Kings, Marshal Sahlins, wrote a public Facebook post about the failure of their book—which had been published through HAU Books—to gain traction. He complained that “On Kings received little publicity apart from some notices with the usual 12-hour half on the Facebook page of HAU,” and that he and Graeber had made “repeated attempts to terminate the book contract.”

Graeber and Sahlins were clearly unhappy with how little attention their book received. On Twitter, Graeber has described the book as the “most intellectually serious book I released last year,” but also that “no-one seems to have read it.” He also complained that it got “zero attention.” The day after Sahlins made his complaint about HAU Books public, Graeber went public with his own apology for being associated with HAU the journal. Despite the conflict, his apology did not mention HAU Books—

I wrote an apology to anyone who has been hurt because of their involvement with HAU. I feel very sorry about this. https://t.co/CTwF6Ofwfu

Without mentioning On Kings, and the ongoing legal dispute he was having with regard to its book contract, Graeber alleged that people had been treated in “shocking ways,” and that the journal’s “sale” to Chicago “will be held out as proof that such projects aren’t viable.” But in fact, HAU was not “sold” to the University of Chicago Press. It was simply incorporated and restructured and had entered into a partnership with a publisher that could absorb the costs of printing the journal.

On the same day that Graeber hit ‘publish’ on his apology, the treasurer of HAU came to da Col’s defence. In a lengthy and emotional Facebook post, she wrote: “This is the most hypocritical public lynching attempt I’ve ever witnessed in my life….” On da Col she wrote: “Yes, he can be a pain in the ass, he’s incredibly demanding and yes, and expects the highest standards of professionalism by people working with him and often that’s unreasonable but the workload he takes on him leaves me speechless at times.”

Five days after Graeber issued his apology, he circulated a letter written by graduate student Emily Yates-Doerr in which she accused da Col of belittling her in email correspondence. After circulating Yates-Doerr’s letter, Graeber also circulated an open letter authored by the ‘HAU 7,’ an alleged group of former HAU workers who wrote anonymously. The letter, published on 13 June 2018, alleged that a culture of bullying, financial misconduct and sexual harassment prevailed at HAU.

To date, it appears that one member of the ‘HAU 7’ group has come forward to attach his or her name to accusations put forward in the ‘HAU 7’ letter—PhD student Taylor R Genovese. Aside from him, it is unclear who alleged that da Col made sexually explicit remarks, or worked sexual innuendo into conversations. It is also unclear how da Col did this, considering that there was never a physical office associated with HAU, and given that all the work was undertaken remotely (it was a digital publication). What is clear is that Genovese, a self-styled “anarchist-communist“, intended to harm the journal, with tweets from 2018 and 2019 declaring:

To complicate matters further, Genovese has also been one of Graeber’s PhD students since 2017. He has devoted at least one academic paper (about dressing up in Spanish Civil War costumes) to the memory of Graeber’s father.

* * *

On Twitter, in the months after issuing his public apology, Graeber has referred vaguely to an unknown quantity of women whom he calls “survivors,” claiming that they were all sexually harassed at HAU. When questioned about this, or asked for evidence to corroborate his claims, Graeber has accused others of “intimidation,” and “retaliation.” According to a leaked confidential statement authored by the HAU Executive Council, when asked about the allegations of sexual harassment, Graeber “declined to provide any evidence, and instead rebuked and threatened the interim chair, Carole McGranahan.” In a leaked email to an unknown recipient, McGranahan wrote that the graduate students and scholars that she spoke to weren’t aware of any evidence for the impropriety alleged by Graeber, nevertheless, “the allegations were instead presented [by Graeber] as if they were evidence themselves.”

When asked to comment on the events in January 2019, Graeber showed no signs of contrition. In an email to me he stated that he “received numerous complaints from HAU workers of serious misconduct at the journal,” and that “after most of a year of behind-the-scenes efforts made no progress, I finally wrote a public statement.”

Graeber has defended himself from the charge of fabricating or exaggerating the allegations against da Col by arguing that he withheld information about sexual harassment from HAU‘s board because he was taking time to formulate the correct response. When asked on Twitter why he had not provided any evidence to substantiate his allegations, he has deflected focus onto other issues.

5. CM demanded I give specific evidence for my claims of abusive behaviour, especially sexual harassment. 6. I responded by demanding to know what process had been used to remove me from the masthead.

Graeber has alleged that the “survivors” of HAU must remain anonymous because da Col, or others inside the field of anthropology, might retaliate against them and derail their careers. Yet it is da Col who has suffered retaliation and had his career derailed. He has not yet finished his PhD, and while working on HAU he forfeited his own honorarium so that others could be paid first. He is broke. He is also no longer the editor-in-chief of the journal he founded, having stepped down in June 2019. His personal and professional reputation is in tatters, in spite of being vindicated by the only official investigation to have taken place into the accusations levelled at him. In January, 2018, HAU’s Executive Council issued a statement which stated—

Our close investigation of recent complaints against HAU and its editor, Giovanni da Col, has shown us the disturbing extent to which these complaints are shaped by negative gossip, hearsay, and personal animosities.

The episode speaks to a larger truth about academia. With an increasing number of academics identifying as “activist-scholars,” the norms of academic behaviour are being thrown into disorder. It has become commonplace to see open letters circulated online by academics demanding that one of their colleagues be fired or censored. Bypassing peer review and due process, we see academics “mobilising,” “forming alliances,” and “drumming up support,” all in an effort to intimidate their political opponents into silence. Graeber is not the only academic to engage in this type of activism but he is a repeat offender. Another of his targets, Noah Carl, was fired from his post-doc position at Cambridge University after a petition filled with unsubstantiated allegations was circulated about him.

very creepy "race scientist" offered job at Cambridge. Students and staff mobilising. Here's an open letter. https://t.co/FQPpGVLDSR

The result is an academy that has lost its traditional standards of civility and reasoned debate and is devolving into an arena much like politics, where the cynical and power-hungry thrive.

Da Col is not without blame for the grievances levelled at his journal. The free-to-read model clearly wasn’t working, and students and academics who work long hours on a publication for no pay deserve our sympathy. At the same time, a well-known and powerful figure within anthropology used his platform and fame to spread unsubstantiated gossip and rumour, ostensibly to enact his version of ‘anarchist justice.’ When the ideal of ‘free scholarship’ came into conflict with reality, Graeber clung to the ideal regardless of whom it hurt. And his version of justice—far from being transparent, fair, or decent—consisted entirely of base appeal to emotion and the brute force of mob rule.

Claire Lehmann is the founding editor of Quillette. Follow her on Twitter @clairlemon

Acknowledgement: For assistance with research and helpful feedback on earlier drafts, thanks go to Dr Charles Cornish-Dale.

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It seems to me that a lot of this academic activism is little more than a veiled pyramid scheme, with participants using the notoriety generated by their activism to promote book sales. I hope the book fails and he has to repay his advance.

There is the rub with these people. Their failures are always someone else’s fault or doings. Graeber blames the failure of his book on HAU not providing sufficient publicity. These people are always about destroying, never creating. Until these reputational terrorists are held accountable they will persist and flourish.

The result is an academy that has lost its traditional standards of civility and reasoned debate and is devolving into an arena much like politics, where the cynical and power-hungry thrive.

This is a fantasy. The type of behavior attributed to Graeber has been common in academia since probably ancient Athens, but certainly in American academic environments since probably since the establishment of Harvard Divinity School (Woodrow Wilson commented, when asked about his political experience when running for governor of New Jersey, replied that he was no stranger to them as he had been President of Princeton). What has changed is the on-line nature of the political competition and the use of allegations of sexual improprieties to attack and discredit–it used to be done over the phone.

You are correct that character assassination is as old as time itself. However I would submit that in the past character assassination was most effective at preventing one from advancing or obtaining a new post. Today people are being relieved of earned positions not by due process or any evidentiary standard but out of cowardice and fear on behalf of employers or superiors. Furthermore there is no longer any repercussions for anyone shown to be a rumor monger or gossip. The fact such tactics have existed in the past does not infer they should be tolerated in the present. Surely society has progressed beyond the Salem witch trials or is at least willing to object when said trials occur.

The claim was made about academic civility. It is true that elites (in academia, those with tenure) now have to worry about being deposed, but they have been complicit (either explicitly or implicitly) in a system which rewards sequacity and punishes integrity. Academia is a feudal institution and is run like one–only in fields where there is a good deal of external involvement and oversight does it produce useful work. Other fields are typically captured by the reigning orthodoxy of the day, whether it be Americanism in the past of social justice now.

“The result is an academy that has lost its traditional standards of civility and reasoned debate and is devolving into an arena much like politics, where the cynical and power-hungry thrive”

I hate to be cynical, but I don’t think there has ever been an academy that had “traditional standards of civility and reasoned debate.” At least, none that I’ve ever known personally. It’s one of the reasons I didn’t go into academia. I’d planned on a PhD in English - this was the early 1980s - but soon discovered people were far more concerned with trendy self-aggrandizing theories of the day that showcased their own egos as opposed to elevating the work itself; more concerned about backstabbing and positioning for power hierarchies; or with sleeping around and exchanging sexual favors and other favors for power. And so on and so forth. Brilliant thinkers were driven out if they didn’t conform to the ideology of the day.

The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was when, at a seminar class, we started talking about Shakespeare (I don’t remember why) and I happened to remark a passage in Merchant of Venice I’d recently read for an easy was “so beautiful!” and quoted a few lines from memory, enthusiastically, thinking I was among fellow geeks who’d love that sort of thing. Instead, as soon as I said the passage was “beautiful,” they looked horrified, as though I’d talked about a turd or puke, and a very uncomfortable frozen silence descended for several seconds before someone brightly changed the subject. None of them looked at me - were in a small informal circle, talking - and avoided me after the class. My crime was I’d said Shakespeare was beautiful. No no no. That was Not Done.

So no, there was never really civility and reasoned debate. And that’s not just in non sciences. My ex was a biology professor/researcher, and the amount of sucking up, backstabbing, idiocies, and egos stroked or diminished, was endemic. It was unusual to have an academic care purely about the area of study. Yes, there were such academics, but they almost invariably were lower level and never rose to prominence because they didn’t “polish all the handles on the big brass door.”

Yes, I’m sure it’s worse now. But this definitely didn’t spring ex nihilo. This whole insanity and maliciousness comes from decades and, well, centuries of festering. I think it’s part of human nature and so arises very easily. I mean look at how the academy treated the blasphemous in the 1500s. The conflagration has been all ready and all it needed was a match. I wonder if the best thing to do is leave altogether, before the whole thing comes collapsing down, destroying many in the process.

Furthermore there is no longer any repercussions for anyone shown to be a rumor monger or gossip.

I disagree with the two quotes above.

It is surely true that malicious gossip, mean spirited backstabbing and the destruction of our perceived enemies is as old at least as Cain and Able. But the perception that all is irremediably rotten seems like a good example of the availability heuristic. I have met many people over the years who are curious, fair minded and possess all the qualities one would wish in a colleague. these same people are from time to time less than fabulous. I only have to look in the mirror to be reminded of human frailty.
The story is about someone of whom i have never heard being beastly towards someone else of whom i have never heard in a field of inquiry in which i have no interest. The nasty man will undoubtedly be brought to book for his transgressions in the fullness of time. The story has appeal as an exemplar of pettiness and that it is spinning around the world at the speed of light. The same methods that the saboteur used are the same that will undo him. I predict he will never be trusted again even within his own circle of acolytes. Trust once lost can never be regained.
Free speech rocks.

This is what anarchism looks like. Anarchism is leftist domination through non-state means. Anarchists think they’re better than State Socialists (which they refer to as “tankies”) because they favor liquid and horizontal organization rather than the State.

But the actions of Antifa, Black Blocs, and Twitter mobs shows that this difference is purely an instrumental difference, a difference of means rather than of ends. How an movement is organized internally has no bearing on how good it treats the people external to it. In this case, any right-wing or even insufficiently left-wing person (see what they have to say about the DSA for instance). What matters is not how anarchists organize themselves, it’s how they want to organize the rest of society. “Anarcho-tankie” is not an oxymoron.

There is also no doubt that anarchists have the potential to commit bloodbaths. The only reason why the Far-right, broadly defined, has a greater body count than anarchists right now is because the latter is aware that killing people is bad optics in a society in which they are a minority. But 10 minutes spent on anarchist hellholes like The Anarchist Library, libcom.org, or /r/ChapoTrapHouse, are enough to convince anyone that,yes, anarchists are dreaming of violence everyday and are only waiting for the right time.

There’s also the (wrong) idea that anarchism has never been tried. In truth it has been tried in Catalonia and Ukraine. Bryan Caplan did a good job at showing that anarchists in Catalonia were no less bloodthirsty than other factions.

Still, everywhere one finds the same core principles: decentralization, voluntary association, mutual aid, the network model, and above all, the rejection of any idea that the end justifies the means, let alone that the business of a revolutionary is to seize state power and then begin imposing one’s vision at the point of a gun.

Oh, really? Well, you should tell that to your friends, particularily Eric “bike lock” Clanton, because they didn’t get the memo apparently!

when people are left to their own devices they naturally behave in decent and democratic ways

For those who don’t know - anthropology is, and has always been, a steaming pile of shit. Anthropology has n ever been a science, and has always been an activist’s paradise. By the time your’e in your second year of graduate work, you have no excuse not to know that you’re in an alternative universe. Those who stay get what they deserve.

So I glanced at Graeber’s Tw*tter feed because I’m a masochist and here’s what he said about the affair:

so one thing I’ve learned from the Qui*lette idiocy is that fascists are very boring. I’ve been trying to think of something interesting to take away from all this. I do have one thought in this regard. 1/

twice now, Claire Lehm*nn has written hit pieces intended to smear me. Each time, the attack was framed around an obvious initial falsehood, carefully & self-consciously designed to mislead but not actually fall under the libel laws 2/

in the first case, she pretended that I was somehow responsible for a student petition that I had merely signed after 80 other scholars had already; in the second, she pretended I’d started a public campaign to denounce someone for sexual harassment … 3/

… when in fact the scandal was not about sexual harassment at all, and my many public statements against the person never once mentioned sexual harassment. 4/

the one thing that actually is slightly interesting in this case is the reaction of Qui*lette supporters. On learning that they had been deceived, that it was not my petition, that it wasn’t a sexual harassment scandal, they simply shrugged & said it didn’t matter 5/

why? you’d think that discovering the author of a piece was intentionally trying to mislead you might put the reader off a little. With many, at least, it seems here to have had the opposite effect, they insist loudly & aggressively that it must be true in some sense anyway 6/

it strikes me this is revealing of a deep truth about the nature of the Trumpian alt right, fake news, etc. It entails a style of propaganda that scams people by convincing they’re part of the team doing the scamming, rather than the marks. 7/

This 1st occurred to me right after the last US election when Trump was doing a round of victory rallies; at one point he mentioned HRC, the crowd chanted “lock her!” He replied, "no, we don’t have to say that any more. That was a good line for us to use during the election… 8/

… but now we don’t need to any more." In other words, he was addressing the entire audience as if they were part of the scam. This is how contemporary right wing thought works. It tricks you into thinking you’re the trickster. 9/

Anyway this seems the only explanation for the reaction of so many Qui*lette readers. CL tries to trick them. Her initial claims are revealed to be false. Rather than object, they try to come up with ways to say it’s true anyway, by twisting logic into pretzels if necessary 10/

because ultimately they see themselves as part of the same team, the same propaganda engine. And as a result, they think they don’t believe what they’re saying, but effectively they do; they think they’re the scam artists, but they’re actually the mark. 11/

I haven’t bothered to follow the whole story. I don’t know which side of the story is correct. But God damn he’s right on the end of 5/ because even if that whole story was bullshit, his whole career, his despicable ideology (anarchism), and in a more general way him being a massive dick, are still enough ground for us to hate him.

@SavageCabbage The asterisks on Quillette and Lehmann were in Graber’s original tweets so I just c/p’ed them. The asterisk on Twitter is my own. To mock him and the fact that Twitter in general is a leftist hellhole.